Until August 2014 a sensible, law-abiding country-dwelling Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of local government, beyond the fortnightly bin collection and the occasional gritting lorry.
Some readers may recognise that I'm parodying AJP Taylor's famous quoatation about life in England before the First World War. However, there's one big difference:- unlike our forebears 100 years ago, we pay a fortune in council tax bills for something whose existence is barely noticeable. My bill arrived at the weekend. It came to over £2,000 - TWO THOUSAND QUID! I don't live in a mansion, I assure you. What's more, we don't even have any street lights in my village. Why on earth am I being asked to pay all this money in return for practically nothing? Even the gritting lorries usually seem to be unnecessarily spewing out the stuff on dry roads which are not remotely likely to ice over. I'd rather they saved the petrol - and saved me a few pounds on my exorbitant bill in the process.
Of course, much of it goes on gold-plated pensions. When we lived in Sussex, I remember when Wealden Distict Council threatened to introduce parking charges. At the same time, I spotted in the local paper a job vacancy with the council, which included an index-linked pension. I pointed out that if public sector workers were made to live in the real world (i.e., to conform to the private sector where index-linked pensions are as rare as hen's teeth), there would be no need to bring in parking charges. They printed my letter, and I'm glad to say that the last time we were back in Sussex, the parking was still free.
But seriously, do we need all this local government? Up to 1888, in the period so beautifully depicted by AJP Taylor, we only had our elected national government at Westminster and the Parish Councils, which were largely run by volunteers, usually retired people. County Councils were unknown before then, and district councils only cme into existence six years later.
When I worked in Brussels, one of my colleagues had previously worked in local government and insisted that we could still run Britain on the pre-1888 basis - in other words, all the functions currently undertaken by County and District councils were either unnecessary or could be delegated upwards to Westminster or downwards to the parish councils. I would love to ask him, in my capacity as editor of Freedom Today, to write a piece explaining how to bring this change about. Unfortunately, we've now lost contact. I did contact the excellent Taxpayers' Alliance, http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/ asking them if they had ever produced a paper on the feasibility of total abolition of County and District councils. Unforuntately, they hadn't, although they have featured a number of articles which shed more light on where all our council tax money goes. According to an e-mail I received a couple of weeks ago from them, over 29,000 local government staff are paid are than £50,000 per annum.
And herein lies the problem:- Can we find people willing to stand for local government on the same platform as UKIP's MEPs? - in other words, to do themselves out of a job? Is the lure of money (and power) too great? For the three big parties, I fear so, but at a time when hard-pressed householders are feeling the pinch, can we really afford the extravagance of so many tiers of government, all complete with their army of bureaucrats? I think not.
As a Christian, I know my responsibility to pay my taxes, and will dutifully, if reluctantly, cough up for my Council Tax bill, but if anyone out there is planning to stand on an "Abolish County and District Councils" ticket, in these straitened times I'm sure they will get many more votes than merely those of my wife and I.
Some readers may recognise that I'm parodying AJP Taylor's famous quoatation about life in England before the First World War. However, there's one big difference:- unlike our forebears 100 years ago, we pay a fortune in council tax bills for something whose existence is barely noticeable. My bill arrived at the weekend. It came to over £2,000 - TWO THOUSAND QUID! I don't live in a mansion, I assure you. What's more, we don't even have any street lights in my village. Why on earth am I being asked to pay all this money in return for practically nothing? Even the gritting lorries usually seem to be unnecessarily spewing out the stuff on dry roads which are not remotely likely to ice over. I'd rather they saved the petrol - and saved me a few pounds on my exorbitant bill in the process.
Of course, much of it goes on gold-plated pensions. When we lived in Sussex, I remember when Wealden Distict Council threatened to introduce parking charges. At the same time, I spotted in the local paper a job vacancy with the council, which included an index-linked pension. I pointed out that if public sector workers were made to live in the real world (i.e., to conform to the private sector where index-linked pensions are as rare as hen's teeth), there would be no need to bring in parking charges. They printed my letter, and I'm glad to say that the last time we were back in Sussex, the parking was still free.
But seriously, do we need all this local government? Up to 1888, in the period so beautifully depicted by AJP Taylor, we only had our elected national government at Westminster and the Parish Councils, which were largely run by volunteers, usually retired people. County Councils were unknown before then, and district councils only cme into existence six years later.
When I worked in Brussels, one of my colleagues had previously worked in local government and insisted that we could still run Britain on the pre-1888 basis - in other words, all the functions currently undertaken by County and District councils were either unnecessary or could be delegated upwards to Westminster or downwards to the parish councils. I would love to ask him, in my capacity as editor of Freedom Today, to write a piece explaining how to bring this change about. Unfortunately, we've now lost contact. I did contact the excellent Taxpayers' Alliance, http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/ asking them if they had ever produced a paper on the feasibility of total abolition of County and District councils. Unforuntately, they hadn't, although they have featured a number of articles which shed more light on where all our council tax money goes. According to an e-mail I received a couple of weeks ago from them, over 29,000 local government staff are paid are than £50,000 per annum.
And herein lies the problem:- Can we find people willing to stand for local government on the same platform as UKIP's MEPs? - in other words, to do themselves out of a job? Is the lure of money (and power) too great? For the three big parties, I fear so, but at a time when hard-pressed householders are feeling the pinch, can we really afford the extravagance of so many tiers of government, all complete with their army of bureaucrats? I think not.
As a Christian, I know my responsibility to pay my taxes, and will dutifully, if reluctantly, cough up for my Council Tax bill, but if anyone out there is planning to stand on an "Abolish County and District Councils" ticket, in these straitened times I'm sure they will get many more votes than merely those of my wife and I.